Sumela Monastery was over a thousand years old—old enough that nobody was exactly sure when it was founded. Perched halfway up a sheer cliff face in northeastern Turkey, it had been in continuous use until less than a hundred years ago, when all Greeks were forcibly evicted from the country to make a totally Turkish state. After years of neglect, it had been partially restored for use as a tourist attraction, but Turkey had not been attracting many tourists lately, even before the recent turmoil in the capital. Now Sumela was a beautiful, lonely, and not totally safe ruin in the middle of ten thousand acres of forested park, accessible only by a steep and narrow half-mile path. Which was why it had just been put back into use as a very unofficial residence for a single twelve-year old girl.
Nadia woke before sunrise; her bundle of blankets did little to keep out the chill from the stone floor. The generations of holy men who lived here were not particular about physical comfort, and Nadia did not think she deserved it. As always, her first act on waking was to hurry to the little church carved into the rocks of the cliff, and sing what she could remember of the memorial service for the dead on behalf of Fatima and the victims of Ankara. She was not totally sure it was appropriate to say these prayers for a batch of Muslims—and she was not sure that Fatima was even dead. Nor was Nadia a priest. She sang the service anyway, in the hopes that God would understand her predicament.
The ruined frescoes on the walls stared solemnly down at her as she sang, offering neither praise nor condemnation. Large chunks were missing from them, leaving the ugly bare rock exposed. Miraculously, the somber face of Christ, at the apex of the high ceiling, was entirely preserved, and His hands as well.
The memorial service was not long, especially when she had forgotten a good chunk of the middle. Next came prayers for the living, for the thousands of terrified Turks now wandering the countryside. She had passed through them, and seen firsthand what their lives had been reduced to. Her only comfort was that most of it was not directly her fault, and that she had played some pitifully small part in keeping it from being worse. Though even that was poisoned by what she’d done to Fatima in the process …
When all was done, she got up from her knees, went out onto the terrace looking over the valley, and had a small breakfast of pita bread and pistachios from her backpack. The backpack itself had been looted from a store, like most of its contents. Only the food had been fairly bought, though she was starting to run low on money. There wasn’t much food left, either. That would be a problem.
How to get money? She might sell something. She emptied the backpack to take stock. The few articles of clothing she had managed to scrounge were essential. Likewise, the ancient paper maps, not that many would want to buy them. Blankets, makeup kit—essential. Her water bottle, perhaps, but she couldn’t see it bringing in much. She’d smashed and thrown away her phone days ago, for fear Mila and her friends could use it to track her.
The books … maybe. She had two of them, a Russian-Turkish dictionary and a Russian-language Turkish instruction book, both looted in a hurry from a bookstore in the suburbs of Ankara. Turkish wasn’t all that different from the Kazakh she already knew, and she was getting more familiar with it from repeated use. Good enough to get along on, mostly. But, again, who would want to buy them?
That just left the gun, which was heavy and incriminating and took up space. That, she could possibly get rid of. She hadn’t had cause to use it yet, only to brandish it at men who looked at her the wrong way. It was less conspicuous than calling Ézarine. Not much, though; why would a teenage girl have a military-issue submachine gun? Then again, offering one for sale would still draw too much attention. Perhaps she would just leave it behind.
It was (if she had counted right) Friday, the first day of February. She had been at this monastery for two nights now, washed ashore by one of the waves of panicked refugees pouring out of the capital region. Plenty of chances for hitchhiking, and picking up the odd rumor. She hadn’t been picky about where she went, so long as it was away from Ankara, and she hadn’t stayed with any one group for long; she didn’t want them to ask too many questions about who she was, why she spoke Kazakh, and why she didn’t say the Muslim prayers.
Random rides brought her to Trabzon on the Black Sea coast, where local talk and a purloined bicycle led her to make the fifty-kilometer trek to Sumela. It wasn’t much of a shelter; there was an old spring for water, but no electricity or heat. The nights were bitterly cold at this elevation, and even with all the blankets she could carry she fell asleep shivering. The best you could say was that the old buildings still kept out the wind.
Even so, her stay had done her good. When she arrived Wednesday night—exhausted and heartsick after days of hitching rides with weeping, frightened Turks, crushed by the weight of guilt carried half a week—she had planned to stay here until she died, praying and fasting like a hermit until she ran out of food entirely, and starved. Ézarine would be marooned in the middle of nowhere, and have no fresh host to jump to, assuming she could take a third host at all. So Nadia could atone for her crimes with her death, and make the world better at the same time. One less terrible weapon, perhaps another child saved from her personal form of damnation.
A long night of hunger and solitude had changed her perspective, and a day wandering the deserted cells and chapels shook her resolution still further. She didn’t stop feeling her guilt, and she didn’t think fear or discomfort were acceptable excuses for forgoing penance. But she did wonder if simply dying in a forgotten corner of the earth was enough to buy her absolution. As she looked out over the forested valley in the morning, twenty-four hours older and wiser, her old plan looked more like a form of cowardice, of simply giving up. It was not martyrdom to die in obscurity from your own stubbornness. That was only suicide—and suicides went to hell, didn’t they? The thought made her shiver, adding to the morning’s chill.
She did not have a better plan yet, but a few ideas were reaching around in the dark of her mind, trying to catch each others’ hands and join together. If she really wanted to be forgiven, and if she wanted to forgive herself, she would need to make a good effort at repairing the damage she and her family had done. That would mean driving the Russians out of Turkey—but she couldn’t do that by herself even if she could find them. Maybe with the rest of the family on her side, but that was no small thing to ask after what she did to Fatima.
Those would have to be long-term goals. In the short term, she would need to find a way to make herself secure and self-sufficient. Which was difficult, but not necessarily impossible, with Ézarine’s help. Less dauntingly, she would want to gather information, now that the initial rush out of Ankara had had time to work itself out. And, while self-sufficiency might not be on the table, Sumela was already more secure than she’d been on the road.
She’d already had trouble once, in a mid-sized town along the coast, from a man in his thirties. Not that he’d been hostile—on the contrary, he’d been all too friendly, asking if he was lost, if she wanted food, asking her name, running a hand through her hair. She declined his offers, walked away, started running when his footsteps followed. It took ten minutes to lose him. Then twenty minutes to collect herself again. It was all she could have done. The gun was buried in her backpack, and Ézarine’s halo would have set the whole town off on a witch-hunt. It would help to get a knife, something to fold up and keep in her pocket. Beyond that …
The monastery had a kind of courtyard, a second tiled terrace between the massive line of red-roofed dormitories hanging over the valley and the other buildings nestled or dug into the rock face of the cliff. She retreated there to practice in privacy. There was a great deal Papa Titus and Hamza had not taught her about using a familiar. One trick in particular she had seen Hamza use to save their lives back in Fatih, when he called Rhadamanthus instantly to kill the soldiers threatening them, his blade already in place to kill. That could save her life, if she could just figure out how to do it.
She visualized a man standing in front of her, then called Ézarine behind him, a hand already in place to clench down where his windpipe would be. Good. But the keystone sequence took time. She tried to do it faster, with little success. Perhaps it depended on her mental state when she called, but trying to work herself up into two different emotions in quick succession sounded hard.
The more she tried, the more it irked her that she had not been taught this already. She knew why she hadn’t; “Papa Titus” would not have wanted her to know something that might let her turn against him more effectively. Even if that same gap in her training might get her killed. The same way he had not taught her Beelzebub’s little trick—perhaps she could try to do that first? It produced a feeling a bit like Ézarine’s halo, after all.
It was worth a try. She visualized the wall, the way the little fly had taught her, the barrier hemming her in on every side so that she could not get out. She might find herself in paradise, if she could only climb over it, but that was impossible. When she was sure she had the picture clear in her head, she called Ézarine. The sequence flashed through her mind’s eye in a bare second, and her familiar was before her at once, ready to strike down any attackers. Success!
She tried it twice more to be sure. Yes. The protective image was also a shortcut. She celebrated her victory by returning to the front terrace to watch the sun rise over the mountains to the east. She heard nothing but birdsong, and the wind in the trees. The road through the valley, far below, led to one of the most remote parts of Anatolia’s arid inner plateau, and saw little traffic. None of the Turks would have reason to come here for a long time, let alone foreign tourists. Nadia was safe, for as long as her food held out. There was water, shelter, peace, and beauty, and she could—in that moment—imagine herself staying here the rest of her life. The weather would turn warm soon enough, leaving only the absence of plumbing to regret. But she would need food, and the world would not hold still in her absence. Soon enough, she would need to return to civilization, and take her chances. But it was hard.
A single car puttered down the road from the north; Nadia’s head idly swiveled to follow it, wondering where its occupant could be off to. It hardly mattered, and it soon passed out of sight. The rumble of its engine faded away, returning the valley to its blessed silence, and Nadia was reluctantly turning to fetch her backpack for the long trip back to Trabzon when she noticed the noise coming back.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
She cocked her head, listening intently—no, there was no mistake. It was coming from down the path. Whoever was driving that car had taken the turnoff for Sumela. A visitor?
There was no cause for desperate hurry. Halfway up the slope the path turned to stairs, impossible to drive a car up, difficult even to haul a bike, as she well knew. She had time to drag hers, and her bag, inside the rock church, then stop to think it over. Did anyone know she was here? She couldn’t think how. She’d taken care to ask a lot of questions, back in town, so that she would not seem especially curious about any one place. Even if she had, this was a long way to come to inquire after a single foreign child who had passed through days earlier. She had to assume this visitor was hostile. It was only a single car, but it could contain an emissor, or someone like Beelzebub, and there was only the one road in and out. That, in retrospect, was a mistake, and it left her trapped—
No. No panic. She took a deep breath, offered up a silent prayer in the direction the altar would have been, and called up her wall again. For good measure, she got the gun back out as well, and made sure it was ready to fire. Whoever it was, they would not find her defenseless.
They took a long time coming; as arduous as the climb had felt two days back, at the end of an exhausting ride, it felt longer still when she had nothing to do but stand still and wait. She was on the verge of tiptoeing out to see if the intruder had slunk away after all when she heard footsteps on the tiled ground outside. One person, moving slowly, and still breathing hard from the climb. Making no apparent effort to keep quiet.
Walking directly into the church in the rock where Nadia was hiding.
It was an older man, a Turk, with a mustache and a short greying beard, a flat black cap on his head and a blue jacket zipped up over a slight paunch. He was still puffing as he ambled in right past her, head bowed, muttering rapidly under his breath. He nearly bumped into her bicycle before he saw it; when he did, he stumbled to a halt, then reached out a tentative hand to touch it, as if unsure it was really there, or afraid it might lurch up and bite him. Still mumbling, but in a different tone, a different language.
Once he was satisfied that there was, in fact, a bicycle sitting inside the church, he turned around to scan the area for other such wonders. Stopping when he got to the spot beside the door where a grubby-looking girl was pointing a gun right at him.
He put up his hands at once, and said in Turkish, “I carry very little money, but you are welcome to it.”
“Why are you here?” Nadia demanded in the same language, trying to pronounce the words without a Russian accent.
“I come here often. It is beautiful. A good place for my sunnah.” He spoke slowly, simply. Like he could tell she was foreign. He peered at her face for comprehension, apparently found it wanting, and added, “Salah? Namaz?”
The last word sounded familiar. “Prayer? You are praying? You talk to God? But this is not a mosque.”
“Men have known God here,” he said, as if it explained all. “I am afraid in Trabzon. Here there is peace. I talk to God, ask for more peace.” His eyes kept drifting back to the gun’s muzzle. “I did not know you were here,” he added.
“I know,” she said, and lowered the gun to point at the floor. “Do not come closer.”
He nodded emphatically, his hands still raised in the air. After a moment, when she did not threaten him again, he said, “I had two daughters. One still lives, and will give me a grandchild soon. I will not hurt you.”
That seemed likely enough. She knelt down—not taking her eyes off the man—and tucked the gun away inside the backpack at her feet. He relaxed visibly, letting out a little breath, and lowered his hands to clasp them in front of his belly. Nadia kept her wall handy inside her head. She did not think this man was an emissor, but caution cost her nothing. “It is dangerous in Trabzon?” she asked him. He frowned at her. She’d used the Kazakh word for ‘dangerous,’ hoping it would translate. Apparently not. “What do you speak besides Turkish?” she tried.
“Some Arapça. For my salah. And to read.” Which … probably meant Arabic? Useless to her. “You are Turkish?” he said, hesitantly, afraid to offend. “But not of Turkey.”
That, she understood. “I am Kazakh,” she said, and he smiled. Foreigners were scary, but all of central Asia was, in a very broad way, Turkish. She might be his eight hundredth cousin five times removed. Almost family. Never mind that she hardly looked it. In this light, he might not see that her eyes were blue. Her hair hadn’t had time to grow out much since the last dye, either.
He stepped back as she went rummaging through her bag again, relaxed when she only pulled out the dictionary. “I could not find one in Kazakh, but I know some Russian too,” she explained, and he seemed to accept it. He relaxed further as she rifled through it for words to explain herself with.
Slowly, with a lot of flipping back and forth for odd words, a picture of Trabzon emerged: a lot of armed men had come into town yesterday morning. They claimed to be Turkish military, and had uniforms and vehicles to match, but they mostly hung around acting tough and threatening people, taking what they wanted without paying for it. A few young men had been hauled in for questioning already, and roughed up. They were especially targeting Kurds, or people they suspected of being Kurdish. Trabzon had very few Kurds—they were mostly in the southeast of the country—but the soldiers were very suspicious, and looking for trouble, and so likely to find it.
The city’s government hadn’t heard these men were coming, and Ankara did not respond to questions. The whole country was on edge already, and the occupation did nothing to make things better. It was only a matter of time before the riots started—the old man was sure of it. He knew how these things happened, he said.
“You should not be here alone,” he told her, jabbing a finger in the air. “A young lady should not be by herself now.”
“Then where should I be?” she asked. “In the city you say is about to riot, full of hooligans with guns?”
“How will you eat, child?”
“I have my bicycle, I can go buy—“
“With what money? What work do you do here? And what if a man sees this little girl, riding along the road by herself? What if that man is not a good man?” He was oddly concerned, given that they had met with her gun in his face. But she did not think he was trying to trick her. “You will disappear.”
“I have a gun.”
“So you, too, will be a hooligan? No.” He shoved his finger so far in her face that she was forced to step back. In the same slow, almost offensively patient voice he lectured her: “This is not right. You will come with me. I have another room, in my house. You can be my cousin. You know this word, cousin? Yes? My cousin, from Kazakhstan. But what is your name, cousin? What do we call you?”
Nadia hesitated. What he was proposing could not work for long. She did not know enough to pretend convincingly. It was a miracle he had not figured it out already. But she needed to go back to town anyway, she still had Ézarine, and she wanted to learn more about these men with guns … “Can we take my bike with me?”
“It will fit in my car. Your name?”
“Fatima.” She couldn’t think of a Muslim girl’s name that sounded much like hers, but this one would at least catch her attention if he called it.
“Very good, cousin Fatima from Kazakhstan. And I am Kemal. Come with me, cousin, and leave your gun behind. We will discuss these things on the way to my house, outside Trabzon.” He gave her a wry smile as they emerged into the sunlight again. “You may have to stay there for a time, until we learn how to hide your blue eyes.”